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Saturday, March 31, 2012

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER

Published: March 30, 2012

His was a love story, Charles D. Snelling wrote — a tale of a shiftless dreamer and the woman who saved him, of the life they built over six decades and the disease that stood no chance of erasing it. By the end, he said, their time together had become a case study in reciprocity.

“She took care of me in every possible way she could for 55 years,” Mr. Snelling wrote of his wife, Adrienne, months before the two were to celebrate their 61st wedding anniversary. “The last six years have been my turn, and certainly I have had the best of the bargain.”

On Thursday, months after contributing a poignant essay to The New York Times about navigating a six-decade marriage upended by his spouse’s Alzheimer’s disease, Mr. Snelling killed his wife and himself, the Snelling family said in a statement released to The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa.. They were found Thursday in their home in Lehigh County in eastern Pennsylvania, the police said. Mr. Snelling shot himself, the coroner said. The ruling on Ms. Snelling’s death was pending. Both were 81. (Photo: Cedar Crest College, via Associated Press)/../

Friday, March 30, 2012

“The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile,” asserted 18th century French physiologist Pierre Cabanis. Last week, the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies convened a conference of neuroscientists and philosophers to ponder how our brains secrete thoughts about ethics and morality. The first presenter was neuroeconomist Gregory Berns from Emory University whose work peers into brains to see in which creases of gray matter those values we hold sacred lodge. The study, “The Price of Your Soul: neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of sacred values,” was just published in thePhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

“Far from being just a tangle of wires, the brain’s connections turn out to be more like ribbon cables — folding 2D sheets of parallel neuronal fibers that cross paths at right angles, like the warp and weft of a fabric,” explained Van Wedeen, M.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and the Harvard Medical School.

“This grid structure is continuous and consistent at all scales and across humans and other primate species.”/.../

March 30, 2012

A hidden, never-before-recognized layer of information in the genetic code has been uncovered by a team of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) thanks to a technique developed at UCSF called ribosome profiling, which enables the measurement of gene activity inside living cells — including the speed with which proteins are made.

By measuring the rate of protein production in bacteria, the team discovered that slight genetic alterations could have a dramatic effect. This was true even for seemingly insignificant genetic changes known as “silent mutations,” which swap out a single DNA letter without changing the ultimate gene product.

To their surprise, the scientists found these changes can slow the protein production process to one-tenth of its normal speed or less./.../

This artist's impression shows a sunset seen from the super-Earth Gliese 667 Cc.

"The Creator must have an inordinate fondness for beetles," the early 20th-century biologist J.B.S. Haldane once said. "He made so many of them." If Haldane had been an astronomer, he might have said the same about the nondescript red stars known as M-dwarfs. As the name implies, they're small, no more than half the size of our Sun at most. They're so dim that not a single one, not even the closest, is visible to the naked eye. And they vastly outnumber any other type of star in the Milky Way: our galaxy has maybe ten or 20 billion Sun-like G stars, but is home to 150 billion M-dwarfs, and maybe more, adding up to some 80% of the galaxy's stellar population./.../

Dr. David Healy has spent decades delving into the dark corners of the pharmaceutical industry, where, for instance, drug companies have tried to hide the worrisome connection between antidepressant drugs and suicide. In the psychiatrist’s best-known previous books, The Antidepressant Era and Let Them Eat Prozac, Healy explored the often vexing history of the mental health field and its troubled relationship with Big Pharma. In his latest book, Pharmageddon, he presents an even bleaker picture of the way industry has co-opted medicine in general — not just mental health. Healthlandspoke with Healy about his findings./.../

I don't know the identity of the physician that stood at the microphone at the end of this presentation, but he hit the nail on the head. "Healthcare is a basic human right," he said; which raises the question, "If the right to healthcare is so basic, why is it so problematic?" When there's trouble in any country, it most usually has to do with the age-old struggle to balance the supply of cash with the demand for services, but that is a woefully inadequate summation. Like any complicated and dying patient whose symptom complex is driven by not just one, but two or even three different disease processes, so are the maladies of healthcare reform in our country. Following suit like a successfully metastatic cancer, those who seek to destroy the good things about our system are attacking simultaneously, at every vulnerable site, repeatedly and efficiently. Make no mistake, as a group of individuals, we as healthcare providers are vulnerable.

I read every page of the healthcare reform bill and posted on that issue a few years ago. I lamented that the word "cardiologist," the gatekeeper of the our country's most expensive DRGs, congestive heart failure the most damning, was never mentioned one single time in the entire diatribe. Congestive heart failure was never mentioned as an entity, period. Although trauma networks were addressed, PCI networking, a smoke-free America, and effective strategies for heart-failure prevention and readmissions were never mentioned. Behind what door were we all sleeping? Or more precisely, who was holding the door shut?/.../

If you could put all the data in the world onto CDs and stack them up, the pile would stretch from the Earth to beyond the moon, according to a new study. The world’s technological infrastructure has a staggering capacity to store and process information, reaching 295 exabytes in 2007, a reflection of the world’s almost complete transition into the digital realm. That's a number with 20 zeroes behind it, in case you're wondering.

Martin Hilbert and Priscila López took on the unenviable task of figuring out how much information is out there, and how its storage and processing have changed over time. Some of their findings seem obvious, like the fact that Internet and phone networks have grown at quite a clip (28 percent per year), while TV and radio grew much more slowly. But others are more surprising, like the nugget that 75 percent of the world’s stored information was still in analog format in 2000, mostly in the form of video cassettes. By 2007, 94 percent of the world’s info was digital./.../

During the 2009-10 H1N1 or “swine flu” pandemic, the same virus that caused mild coughing and sneezing in some patients proved fatal for others. It highlighted a medical mystery: why are some people more fit to handle the flu than others?

British and American researchers think they have a clue. Reporting on Sunday in the journal Nature, researchers say they’ve found a gene that influences our susceptibility to flu illness. The gene, called IFITM3, is the “crucial first line of defense” against the flu, researcher Paul Kellam of Britain’s Sanger Institute toldReuters.